Web services are an emerging technology and offer the dual promise of simplicity and pervasiveness. Web services represent the next level of function and efficiency in e-business. A Web service may be viewed as any mechanism by which an application or data processing service may be provided to other applications on the Internet.
Web services may be informational or transactional. That is, some services provide information of interest to the requestor, while other services may actually lead to the invocation of business procedures. Examples of publicly available Web services today include stock quote services, services to retrieve news from Web news sources, and currency conversion services. By way of example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,604,135 discloses a method and system for location-based Web services.
For more detailed information on Web services and technologies related thereto, reference is made to pages or documents on the websites of Microsoft Germany, W3.orq, and n.ethz.ch.
One example of Web services are the services responsive to simple object access protocol (SOAP) messages. SOAP is an application invocation protocol that defines a protocol for exchanging information encoded as XML messages. Normally, these services are described by WSDL (Web Service Description Language) notation stored in WSDL documents. A WSDL document may be stored in numerous ways such as in a file, in a DB2 XML registry/repository, or in a DB2 based UDDI registry, for example. UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, Integration) is a protocol for describing Web services such that interested parties may easily discover them. Specifications for this registry and use of WSDL in the registry are available at uddi.org. Service providers may register their services in a UDDI, specifying technical information about how to invoke the service. Often a WSDL document is stored in a UDDI registry in order to define the messages a particular Web service accepts and generates.
The design of UDDI allows enterprises that own Web service enabled applications to publish data about themselves and their services. By providing this information, UDDI implements a simplified form of searching for those interested in locating a particular Web service in which to fulfill an application process. The conventional UDDI search is focused on single search criteria, such as business name, business location, business categories, business identifier, service type by name, and/or discovery URL (Uniform Resource Locator).
Various approaches for implementing Web services are known, such as described in U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2003/0093436A1, 2003/0055868A1, 2003/0055624A1, 2003/0018661A1, 2003/0110242A1, 2003/0163513A1, 2004/0064503A1, 2004/0045005A1, 2004/0003130A1, and 2003/0187841A1.
It is a common disadvantage of conventional Web services that they usually require some degree of manual user interaction. Manual user interaction is tedious and error prone. Another disadvantage of manual interaction is that data, which is already available in electronic form, needs to be manually re-entered into the Web service. In particular, the level of manual interaction and monitoring required by known Web services is costly in terms of the required human resources.